Germany and the Reformation (part VI)

At
first sight, there is no relationship between this awkward sensibility and the
ever-increasing will which permitted the last of the German painters, dead at
the age of forty-six, to inclose, within the sustained undulation of a line as
sober as Latin intelligence, the complexity of the German soul. Upon closer
study, however, the race is the same. Hans Holbein scrutinized the drawings of
Michael Angelo, of da Vinci, and of Raphael; he studied the frescoes of Venice,
of Mantua, of Padua, and of Florence, perhaps, where he was to go after leaving
Basel, in search of education from the Italian masters to assist him in
extracting from the complex work of Cranach, of Dürer, of Grünewald, and of
Martin Schoengauer the elements of a clearer and more plastic definition of the
effort of Germany. A line impossible to break connects the clear, gentle, and
wild portraits of Cranach, the linear and compact portraits of Dürer, all the
portraits of all the Germans, from Aldegrever to Baldung Grien, and from
Bartolomäus
Bruyn to Christoph Amberger, with the matchless images of the master of Basel—a
line, as evanescent as the light that plays over the surface of flesh and as
decisive as a bony projection, giving the sensation of the mass of a living
face, of the mind, and the muscles, of the bone, and the blood, and of the soul
that hovers concentrated over all.

He has
already inherited from his father, the old master of Augsburg, that line,
awkward in appearance, which so faithfully follows the contour of the face,
neglecting none of the accidents—that line which, with a terrible conscientiousness,
restores in the face the irregular hollows and projections, giving it its
special accent, through the manner in which the eye is set in the socket, the
chin and cheekbone are outlined, the nose is flattened or protruded, the
forehead or temples bend or broaden. The Italians had counseled him to insist a
little more here, a little less there, in order to keep the face wholly at the
height of its expression. They had shown him the way to fill a frame, how to
stop at the proper moment, how to establish a defined volume in space. They
certainly did no more for him than that. If he chooses, as they do, it is not
to generalize: it is to individualize. Instead of attempting to arrive through
synthesis at a universal truth, he attains through analysis a particular truth.
The instrument which he receives from the Italians is employed the more to
search within him and around him for the Germany which he is to define more
accurately. When he leaves Basel for London, it is still as a German that he speaks
of the English, It is as a German that, in the great severe portraits—less
finished, perhaps, despite their grandiose minuteness than his sketches in
pencil—he accumulates on the walls, the tables, and the shelves of the
furniture, a hundred objects as precise as the face, inkstands, terrestrial
globes, manuscripts, squares, compasses, magnifying glasses, and parchments
which, with their steel points, their copper edges, their lenses, and their
legible characters, one after another convince us of the certitude as to the
place where we are and the identity of the being before whom we find ourselves.

This
great artist appears at first as a great scientist. One would say that as a
good German he had made it his mission to test, one after another, the truths
which the Italians or the Flemings had intuitively conquered. By dint of will
power, by dint of study, he came to understand why two or three associated
colors, arousing in us the sense of the original unity of things, sweeping
through us with an irresistible sentiment of fullness and purifying happiness,
teach us more about the things and about ourselves than a century of researches
accumulated incoherently. Like the German thinkers of the eighteenth century
and the German scientists of the nineteenth, it was through the patient
decomposition and the methodical reconstruction of all elements that he found
the harmonies which other races seize upon in a single stroke.

But how
his science elevates him, as soon as he grasps it! Those harmonies, juxtaposed
and no longer penetrated by that visible atmosphere which reveals to the
Venetians and to the painters of the Low Countries the universal movement of
life, are like a pure mass of intangible reality sustained by everything within
our remembrance. His reds, his oranges, and his blacks do riot seem to be
rubbed upon his somber greens, but to be woven into the material itself,
yielding a rich substance as if ground in a mortar—and everything contributes
to it: the clothing, the metal and the glass of the implements and the jewels,
the wood of the furniture, the skin of the hands and the faces, and the opaque
whites of the eyes. A dull splendor, which does not radiate, but which seems,
on the contrary, to sink into the center of the work, gives to all these things
a cold profundity, a depth under which other depths are divined, like a pure
water to the bottom of which we cannot see. In this sense, his canvases surpass
those of the primitives of Bruges, whose red and black are like blood and ink
changed into translucent stones. . .The soul, space, and the living or the dead
matter are concentrated together until they attain, at the extreme point of
molecular condensation, the density of the diamond.

One
understands how this man, so resolute in penetrating to the central core of
things, should have been, among all the men of his time who made the attempt,
the one who succeeded best in giving, through his images, an eternal life to
the most impartial spirit of his century; the man of almost complete wisdom,
who, amid the furious tumult of appetites and consciences into which men were
hurled by the struggle between the reformers and the Church, retained entire
freedom of judgment. As well as Erasmus, he had certainly seen the fire lighted
about the stake, the pincers opening in the depth of dungeons, the torch in the
hands of the people, and the steel in the hands of the soldiers. But his
impassive eye sought, in the brutal torrent of the passions let loose, the
forms and movements capable of expressing the passion which led him to search
for higher realities. Through his art we have seen the spears pass by, the
pikes flying, and the horsemen, the executioners, and the landsknechts putting
forth their strength; but the violence is studied without hatred or sympathy—as
a human phenomenon suited to enlighten him about men. The nervous elegance of
the forms in action and the roll of the muscles under the leather garb appear
in sober tumult. It is as if the steel of the sword were flowing in the
arteries and were vibrating in the tendons, so as to compel life, even in its
bloodiest quarrels, to follow the imperious mind of an artist who, when he
seeks in wine the forgetfulness of his personal cares, seems trying to cut off
from himself everything that is not the image which his eye imprints upon his
mind. The curves and volutes of the German masters, who, before him, twisted
even the limbs of human beings like vine branches, are concentrated and
stylized in the vigorous frame of fruits, leaves, and naked children with which
his engravings and his drawings are surrounded. Through the force of his will,
he compelled order to continue in the German soul during his lifetime. He
imposed impartiality upon his creative power. The faces which he has left—those
great Teutonic faces, at once bony and soft, under the shadow of the hats—are,
in the realm of painting, certainly those which have transmitted to us most
scrupulously—and at the same time the most soberly—the whole truths about the
beings who passed before him. Never eye more pitiless—and consequently more
enamored of that which survives the illusion of sight brought about in us by
our indulgence toward ourselves and toward others—never eye more pitiless than
the one he fixed upon us. Never the mind, rising up in the open eyes, the closed
lips, the silent brows, and the jaws—never has the mind been more closely
incorporated with the compact bones which it sculptures, and which sculpture it
in a continual interchange. Now this mass of life thinks, now it does not
think; nothing of it hovers outside itself, nothing of it escapes within.
Holbein never employs his artist's piety to tell anything about nature and
about its highest expression—the head of a man or of a woman—save that which
they dictate to the voluntary indifference of his clear sight. Beautiful or
ugly, all of these faces radiate a singular purity, which is the indescribable
mark of his own dignity. He expends his whole tenderness on a feminine brow
under a transparent veil, on the features, sad and grave and heavy with humanity,
of a woman who holds two children between her knees.

Although German sentimentalism
is invisible in him, and doubtless because of that, Holbein represents the
highest effort of German plastics. Very German in his scrupulous precision, his
power of analysis and reconstruction, he is the only one of the Germans who
knew how to choose, the only one who almost never confused what is beautiful
with what is strange, what is essential with what is exact, what is profound with
what is complicated; the only one who sought to disengage from detail and from
accident, in a reality concrete in itself and outside of all realization, the
secret logic of that reality. He is the only one who does not impose sentiment
upon form, but seeks through form an understanding of sentiment. An incredible
power of will made him slowly catch up with, and, at certain points surpass,
those who have only to open their hearts to find the secret of the great
plastic truths. It is natural that he should represent at once the end of
German painting and the exception which proves its habitual impotence to give
to the visible world its architectural meaning. In spite of him and apart from
him, German painting remains a great confused murmur, quivering with indistinct
life. It is the German musicians, with cries of exaltation and with the deep
rapture of a universe on the point of self-discovery, who will one day seize
upon the splendid weapon the painters of their country had let fall.